PurelyFunctional.tv Newsletter 262: Launching, Jargon, Fearless

I’ve been talking to customers every day, asking them about their goals, what they’re working on, and how best they learn. Each customer is a different challenge. I find myself being transformed by these conversations.

I work alone, in my office, building the PurelyFunctional.tv platform and content. It’s easy to get lonely. But worse, it’s easy to abstract my customers into something they’re not.

I’ve said it before: my 2018 is all about people. More conversations. More relationships. More empathy. More understanding.

These past two weeks, I’ve given people pointers to awesome Clojure learning material and great advice for learning Clojure. I’ve connected people looking for jobs to significant people in the Clojure community. I’ve committed to doing code reviews to give people deadlines to encourage them to complete projects. In short, I’ve been giving more than I’ve given before. And it feels great.

Kevin Lynagh gave a great talk at Deconstruct 2017. It’s all about design. He goes through an example of designing the interface for specifying spacing in his company’s design application. Specifically, by listening to their users, they decided to take a step back and ask about the deeper underlying ideas behind the margin/padding concepts that CSS gives you. They come up with a a much simpler and more expressive concept. I think this is so important in software. It’s so easy to “add features”, but when do we step back, revisit the conceptual model, and make a cleaner choice?

Alan Cooper (author of The Inmates are Running the Asylum) spoke about Agile software development back in 2008. I have not heard such a great description of my experience of Agile and its dysfunctions.